"Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses - and parties. " - Sen. Rand Paul

"We don’t want leverage. We want a real process and time to debate, amend and vote," - "It’s not too much to ask..."

Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses - and parties. Here’s the 2,232 page, $1.3 trillion, budget-busting Omnibus spending bill we received with just hours to try to read it before voting. Congress is broken.

The comments on Rand Paul's social media show that he brought attention from the entire spectrum of American public opinion.

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"Paul was noncommittal on Thursday as he walked into a Republican caucus lunch. He said he had more than 2,000 pages of the 2,200-page bill left to get through before he would decide how to proceed.

“I’m on page 56 right now, and so I’ve got a few more pages to read. I don’t have any other comment,” Paul said. A few hours later he tweeted that he was on page 207 of the “monstrous” bill and began singling out pieces of the bill for criticism."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) continued to try to set up a vote before the shutdown deadline, but made a procedural move that would allow the Senate to begin advancing the bill on Saturday at 1 a.m. That would mean another brief lapse in government funding, making it the third shutdown of the year.

Republicans had hoped that they could produce the spending deal much earlier this week to evade Paul's procedural protests and give the Senate time to pass the bill without the possibility of a shutdown. But top congressional leaders released the bill at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, infuriating Paul and other conservatives who say it is not nearly enough time to review the legislation.

The outrageous, absurd concern being expressed by Paul is that senators should have more than 20 or so hours to digest a 2,232-page, trillion-plus dollar bill that doesn’t just fund the entire federal government at new levels for the next six months but also touches policy ranging from gun background checks to the labor rights of minor league baseball players. After all, the House made quick work of the bill, passing it around 1 p.m. in a blitz that included Republicans gaveling a procedural vote closed before all Democrats could cast their votes. It’s a little harder to railroad something through the Senate, where one dissatisfied member can slow the process to a crawl.

“It’s just a question of if he delays the vote,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune said. “It’s doesn’t change” the outcome. And it’s not like Paul, who has philosophical objections to the existence of discretionary spending, is ever going to flip to a “yes” no matter how many times he reads through the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2018.

When asked what he plans to do early Thursday afternoon, Sen. Paul said that he was only onPage 56 of the bill and refused further comment.